Program on Science, Technology and Society at Harvard

The Arts of Being Governed: Reason and Expertise in a Contested World

November 21-23, 2024,
Harvard Kennedy School

Abstract

GRiSTS 2024: In 2024, questions of the future of democracy have taken center stage as perhaps never before. More than one-quarter of the people on earth were called to the polls, and the image of two billion voters on the move appears as a celebration of the democratic franchise. Yet we are also flooded with fears of authoritarian rule, anti-democratic demagogues, misinformation, election tampering, and specters of social-media induced violence. Elections in this context have come to be labeled existential: a series of referenda on the continued existence of democracy itself. The tensions between these narratives, of democracy on the march and democracy rushing toward its own destruction, emerge in stark binaries: truth against lies, debate against violence, reason against irrationality, and institutions and the rule of law against populist anarchy. These binaries remind us that the sources of legitimacy in our political institutions extend beyond voting. They get at the heart of how political order is constituted by, and constitutive of, shared ideas about right knowledge, good public reason, and legitimate technologies of self-rule. For its fifth edition, the GRiSTS organizing committee invites abstracts that deal with how the sciences (including social sciences) and technology structure the realm of politics, re-configure democratic life, and help to produce new imaginations of a global polity. Comparative projects are particularly welcome. Prospective presenters should submit abstracts of up to 350 words.

Co-sponsored by the Harvard Center for the Environment and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs